Snowy Waltz

SKIING 2006

In this dance, skier and ski become one as they carve graceful and elegant arcs into slopes.

October 22, 2006|By Peter Shelton, Universal Press Syndicate

Why is it that ski instructors look so much better than mere mortals on the hill?

I'm not talking about their golden tans or their snappy uniforms. I'm talking about how they stand tall on their skis, the seeming effortlessness of their turns, the melon-round lines they draw on the snow.

Take Stephen Jentzen, one of Vail's top instructors. When Jentzen led the way off the top of the mountain on a cottony Colorado day in March, he cut a slender, dashing figure in blue. But what really impressed me was the way he used simple foot and ankle movements to tilt his skis on edge, and how the tracks he left were perfect parallel grooves, like curving railroad tracks.

Jentzen was carving. He was riding the shape of his skis -- letting them turn him -- rather than muscling his boards through a skidded turn.

"All skiing is letting go and holding on," he said as we rode the chair to Blue Sky Basin. "Skidding, braking, what we used to call windshield-wiper turns -- that's holding on. Carving is letting go."

Letting go without giving up control -- it sounds like a contradiction, but it isn't. It is simply the holy grail of snow skiing, a not-so-mythical key to becoming an expert.

I knew about carving -- or the dream of carving, anyway. I knew how it was supposed to work. But to really get it, I decided to visit two of Colorado's giants, Vail and Copper Mountain.

Both areas are famous for their huge swaths of groomed-smooth, green and blue (beginner and intermediate) terrain -- the kind of long, gently tilted spaces you need to practice carving. Both resorts have highly touted ski schools. It wasn't to be a test or a competition, but I thought it would be fun to see how they compared.

A lesson in letting go

Stephen Jentzen has been teaching skiing for 32 years. We met in front of the fireplace at the Golden Peak base, where he explained that carving has been an elusive and tantalizing goal since the invention of skis with curved sides. Picture a ski's shape: wide fore body, narrow waist, wide tail. Place a ski on edge, and it will trace an arc equal to this built-in radius.

The trouble was, the long, narrow skis that were standard for the past 70 years came with built-in radii of 45 meters or more. Only the sport's ham-thighed geniuses could ride these relatively straight sticks in pure-carve mode.

The rest of us had trouble handling arcs that big, and the speed that accompanied them. We learned to twist and skid; every turn was a compromise between letting go and holding on.

But the 1990s saw a design and materials revolution that now allows every skier to at least approximate the carves of the ski gods. It's akin to the revolutions in tennis racquets (sweet spots as big as Rhode Island), in superforgiving golf clubs, or mountain bikes with disc brakes and full suspensions.

Ski-makers combined shorter lengths with Mae West proportions to bring the intrinsic turn radius down to 25 meters, then 15, then (in a modern slalom shape) to a whippet-quick 8 meters. Now, in theory at least, we can carve at relatively slow speeds all over a mountain.

Jentzen showed me how to make railroad tracks on the catwalk across to Vail's Cloud 9.

"To start, you need a pitch so gentle you'd feel comfortable running it straight," he said. Once we were coasting along, he had me tilt my right ski up on the little toe side. "Right edge to go right." The left ski followed suit as if on its own.

Then we switched and tipped the left ski on its left (little toe) edge. Both skis curved to the left. We stopped and looked back at tracks that appeared to have been engraved, the tools on our feet slicing rather than scraping the snow.

Together, we ranged across Vail's vastness, from distant Blue Sky Basin (six miles from the village) to the alabaster bathtub of Poppyfields in China Bowl. We never skied the same run twice, and we didn't return to the base until day was done.

A European sensibility

That's a big part of Vail's draw. It is huge -- 33 lifts, 3,450 vertical feet, 5,289 acres -- the single biggest ski mountain in North America. Snowcats groom an average of 1,200 to 1,600 acres every night, leaving in their wake what skiers call "corduroy," the minutely ribbed, exquisitely carvable "king's cloth."

The expansiveness works inside you as well. Learning is easy when you have mile after uninterrupted mile to reinforce the movements.

The Euro scale is not surprising when you consider that Vail's founders were 10th Mountain Division veterans who fought in Italy and saw the Alps firsthand. They brought a European sensibility to the village as well.

After my lesson, I walked the cobblestones of Bridge Street to the patio at Pepi's Gasthof Gramshammer. The waitress brought me a Hefeweiss, a frosty wheat beer with a wedge of lemon. She was a native of Innsbrook, at home in a traditional Tyrolean dirndl.

Other Euro-themed lodges in Vail include the ultra-high-end Sonnenalp, run by fourth-generation Bavarian innkeepers, and the lift-side Lodge at Vail.